Spank 'm!
Actually, what's going to happen to that cash?
The European Commission has concluded its third probe into Google's business practices by whacking it with a €1.49bn fine. The third investigation dealt with advertising broker services that Brussels said foreclosed competition and raised prices for website operators. Google stopped these practices in July 2016 – after the …
Probably contribute to what I'm told is their rather nice wine cellar.
However you are expecting Google just to get out their chequebook. I rather suspect the Google lobbyists are already knocking on doors in Brussels as we speak with the aim to get the fine watered down.
Probably contribute to what I'm told is their rather nice wine cellar
Fine wine (if kept correctly) is a pretty good investment - unless you drink it of course. Much like rare whisky (I nearly wept when I saw how much my long-deceased bottle of "As we get it" whisky would have been worth if I hadn't drunk it..)
I wondered the same thing which led me to http://ec.europa.eu/budget/explained/budg_system/financing/fin_en.cfm
Notable:
> The budget also has other sources of revenue, e.g.:
> - taxes on EU staff salaries
> - contributions from non-EU countries to certain programmes
> - fines on companies for breaching competition laws, etc.
When I lived in Brussels, all the Eurocrats appeared to be into swingers parties, rather than BDSM. Or at least that was all the stuff that was mentioned in the expat circles I moved in.
There is a lot of basement space in the Berlayment though. I think they've got 3 levels of basement carpark, and room for 5,000 cars. Surely with Brexit they'll need a few less spaces and could build a bijou dungeonette down there?
Now I'm back in Blighty, I'm an ex-expat - or a "pat" for short. Penguin icon for lack of black and white cats.
"reinvest the antitrust fines levied directly into European Commission antitrust resources and staff to more swiftly investigate and effectively deter future violations."
You had to read the article to the end to get to that bit. What a surprise! The first to comment didn't bother doing that.....
In the future (short term) those rules stay on our books and the Competion and Markets Authority will enforce them - instead of handing the bigger cases over to the EU, as they do now. For example, didn't they just stop the Sainsbury's Asda merger?
Actually one consequence of us leaving the EU might not be our rules getting watered down, but the EU's. The German and French governments are still complaining about the Commisison stopping the Siemens Alstrom merger, and are suggesting changing EU rules to allow the creation of "European Champions" - in order to supposedly compete better globally.
Just look from where his acting Secretary of Defense comes from...
"Patrick M. Shanahan became the Acting Secretary of Defense on January 1, 2019. Prior to this assignment, he served as the 33rd Deputy Secretary of Defense, appointed on July 19, 2017. The Washington state native holds two advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent more than 30 years at Boeing" [emphasis mine]
https://www.defense.gov/Our-Story/Meet-the-Team/Acting-Secretary-of-Defense/
Boeing always try to be on the "right side" - even if they though Clinton could have become president, they changed course far quicker than an F-15 could... never underestimate the maneuverability of some executives.
"Couldn't the Commission spend the €8bn they had in fines off them, and create their own rival search engine called gEUgle?"
Yes, whatever did happen to the much-vaunted Quaero?
Sadly, it appeared to end up as nothing more than a bureaucracy-heavy means to subsidize researchers?
(Nothing at all wrong with *investing* in research, but it would have been nice if something useful had actually come out of it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
Playing MeToo with an incumbent like Google, and with rules that preclude doing it as well as them regardless of how good your researchers are, is not a productive use of research funds.
There's lots of good research around Europe that would've made better recipients for funds.
"Quaero received public funding from the French government, not the EU. As the article you link to states in its second sentence."
Yes, but was it not originally conceived as supposed to be a multi-country project? It sounds as though Germany then diverted its attention elsewhere, and presumably the idea of attracting other partners in other EU countries didn't quite happen.
(My point actually was that you can't try to artificially encourage someone to invent a new and better search engine, but, on the other hand, if someone already has some innovative ideas but needs funding to help that idea come to fruition...)
(And we have Qwant now, anyway.)
But they might go along with Spotify's argument that Apple only allowing the App Store on iPhones means that the App Store is a monopoly, even though iPhones are a clear minority of overall smartphone sales.
If they buy that argument, I imagine next we'd see ARM claim that Intel CPUs ability to only execute x86 code and not also execute ARM code constitutes a similar illegal monopoly...
Other than Microsoft and Google, has the EU acted against any other US company?
This one seems like a legit violation. Blocking out competitors is a bad thing (ah, reminds me of the Intel/OEM collusion time period).
I still disagree with many other judgments, such as Google being penalized for showing its own services on its own webpages. If you don't want to see Google's stuff, do NOT go to Google.com in your web browser and then search for things. And if Google is your default engine and you don't know how to change it, maybe try googling it, ah shit, you just can't win.
I find a lot of this so excessive because the consumer has choice. Don't like Google? Use another company. This isn't even 1% as tedious as changing something like an energy supplier, or internet service provider.
If you can spell "Bing" (Or DuckDuckGo personally) and use bing unobstructed, then you have access to healthy competition.
>The backlash has started.
Nah, I'd say its just a modern version of bank robbery -- you go after these big companies because "that's where the money is". It would be slightly more honest to actually come out and say so rather than going all sanctimonious about 'big tech'.
(...and yes, I happen to think that Facebook is Evil....Google might be Not So Good,....but it doesn't mean that they exist to be sponged off.)
"FTR, the fines aren't about enforcing fairness and equality."
It's possible that this was done purely for the good of the EU by the EU, but it's also possible that a competitor lobbying against Google helped the process along.
I know there was a group of high tech companies and advertisers led by a well known but significantly less popular search engine provider that was hoping the EU might decide to fine Google just as they were fined a few years before for their own indiscretions.
Nah, I'd say its just a modern version of bank robbery -- you go after these big companies because "that's where the money is". It would be slightly more honest to actually come out and say so rather than going all sanctimonious about 'big tech'.
No, it's going after companies in monopoly positions who are abusing those positions, just like the the US did back in the days of the robber barons.
Yahoo really deserved it.
That is, twenty years ago, when they were dominant in that they had all the mindshare in the media, and thus had and abused more of a monopoly than Google ever did.
But that was then. Yahoo is no longer the same company. We don't go after companies for such historic violations except where there's a proper witch-hunt.
Time to learn "Star Mangled Spanner"
Ah - the one about the pride of the US space Navy that fell foul of a neutron star? All that was left was one single star-mangled spanner..
(h/t to either Asimov or AC Clarke - I think one of them wrote that short story)
"(h/t to either Asimov or AC Clarke - I think one of them wrote that short story)"
ISTR (vaguely!) that it was a short story in a collection based around the Tricentennial or something like it. and I'm leaning more towards Asimov than Clarke. My Google-fu is failing though.
On the one hand they will put the profit they make from operating in the EU.
On the other hand they will put the fines they're paying, and the loss of worldwide profit from changing the way they conduct business everywhere else to fit EU rules.
If they find the second number is larger, things could get interesting. Not that I don't agree that Google is clearly abusing their monopoly, but if the EU is going to be the only one enforcing it Google will have to at least consider walking away from that market. Brexit (if/when it finally happens) would help swing the scales a little in favor of a "Goo-exit" since they wouldn't lose UK revenue by pulling out of the EU.
Is it wrong that I really want this to happen, just because it would make for fascinating reading in the comments section of El Reg for years to come?
I dont think so. The reason is that, believe it or not, Euroland does also produce content- and Google needs to index it. Its mission is to index the world, afterall. If it puts EU (then perhaps Russia, and China) in boxes to remove them - what is left for the US? North/South america, Asia and Nigerian Princes?
Google can still index the EU even if they don't do business there in terms of selling advertising, etc. And of course making it punitive for EU citizens - if they aren't going to make money there they would geoblock Google Search, GMail etc. including on Android phones operated in the region.
If Google has no offices or employees in the entire EU, doesn't make any money that's taxable in the EU, the EU can't touch them. They can't prevent them from indexing anymore than they could prevent Baidu from indexing EU sites despite not doing business in the EU - the sites themselves could prevent it if they so chose by blocking Google's crawler while leaving Bing etc. alone.
Google makes 1/3 of its revenues from the EMEA area. You can do the math...
Anyway being this a B2B issue, Google has far more space to change how it does business in EU only - until other countries follow the EU lead, and it could happen sooner than Google would like.
US Democrats look now far more keen on antitrust issues now...
"EMEA" > "EU".
Your 33% figure doesn't tell us how much revenue they make from the EU alone, nor does it tell us how much they'd lose in the rest of the world if they were forced to enforce EU rules worldwide because of the "what if an EU citizen elsewhere in the world conducts a search, buys an Android phone, etc." factor which they've already claimed to have the power to apply with the GDPR. Why would this be any different for EU overreach?
There is a market opening up for a search engine that operates from a single non-EU country with no European assets, that can ignore any EU legislation, since they have nothing to lose.
The EU could try and block them but that would be about effective as their war on piracy.
Unless users know how to craft specific search criteria, Google is just becoming a provider of links to adverts and near matches, rather than the razor sharp results it used to be famous for. Come to think of it, maybe Google search has just become another casualty of Google's rationalisation program.
Do you really believe most of those revenue comes from Middle East and Africa?
Yet frankly I can't really understand that US view of "EMEA".... although for most companies make little sense to setup ME and A HQs exactly because of the limited client base and revenues, so they get aggregated with the far larger E.
Still, EMEA revenus are double the APAC area - so not really something you can ignore....
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/266250/regional-distribution-of-googles-revenue/)
Anyway, again, this has nothing to do with user interfaces and accounts - this ruling is about B2B contracts about ads sources and placements - not really a technology matter, mostly a contractual one - which already tend to be very area-specific due to different laws.
You must also consider the LOSS OF PROFIT in the rest of the world if they are forced to change their business practices, divest holdings, etc. to conform with EU rules. If the EU tried to force them to make changes which would cost them 25% of their worldwide profit, it would be an easy decision for them to pull out.
Now in some cases they might be able to do business differently only within the EU, but with the EU pulling a United States and thinking their rules apply everywhere (i.e. claiming GDPR applies to EU citizens anywhere in the world, so you can't assume access to a US site from a US location is free from GDPR obligation) that's probably not going to fly.
I use my phone to speak to people and them to me. Do some web browsing and play media, take photos and video.
Can someone cobble together a lightweight OS for a generic 5-6 inch pile of bits fashioned into a phone please?
Not aware of one myself as they all seem to be some version of android.
There was some promise with wileyfox boasting of security but they got clobbered probably for that reason.
I would imagine the battery would last days and days without the unit constantly trying to do google stuff.
This post has been deleted by its author
I'd recomment the old Nokia E6 - unfortunately, its software is so out of date, it doesn't even support TLS (only SSL)
If it had uptodate software, it would be great. As it is, despite owning loads of android tablets and tv boxes (typing this one one now), the E6 with it's battery lasting a week is still my go-to phone!
http://www.welshgit.net/misc/nokia-and-android-desktop-20190323.jpg :-)